With the development of the Internet, video surveillance and streaming media on demand have been widely used, and demand for playback of remote video gets increasingly strong. In the prior art, streams are downloaded from a remote server and buffered in a memory for playing. At a server end, video files on the same time axis are stored in the server end in the form of a video file for the user end to download. The video file has an index area and a second-level index area, where the index area includes a start address, a file length, a start time, an end time, file information, and a second-level index, and the second-level index area includes intra frame I frame information, and the I frame information specifically includes a start time of an I frame, an address of an I frame, and private information.
In the study and implementation of the prior art, the inventor of the present invention finds that, in the prior art, streams are downloaded from a remote server and buffered in a memory for playing, and with the advent of a high-definition era, a higher requirement is put forward on memory consumption of terminals, and moreover, it is almost a blank in current application to continuously download different video files on the same time axis.